Pure speculation please

How would the game be different if Green Ronin had gotten it?

It would still be 2nd Edition.

It would be something less imaginative and creative than it is and something I wouldn't be playing. It wouldn't blend the tactile and user-friendly elements of board/card games with the roleplaying elements of traditional table top to create an game engine that sings. I've purchased several Green Ronin products over years and none have inspired me.

Seems emirikols love affair with 3e has finally come to an end. I still love wfrp and I still sorta like 3e though no one I know wants to play it I'm sorta wishing they had just keep the old system and revamped it with the rule additions they made for 40k rpg.. I think thats the route green ronin would have taken.

I actually like it (3e) mostly the way it is, especially the mechanics. I think it is a bit ahead of its time to be honest. It isn't without its flaws, but is has enough perks to keep me interested. All that aside, 2e dominates the fluff side of this setting.

There would also be a lot less of it I guess. When Green Ronin were writing 2nd Edition they put out a lot of stuff. But I have several of their games (Dragon Age, A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, DC Heroes) and all of them are marred by slow release schedules. Dragon Age is probably the best as they have managed to put out Core Sets 1 and 2, a book of 3 adventures and a GM's screen / pack. But the gaps have been huge and if you were playing it regularly you would have hit the level ceiling easily between the release of set 1 and 2. That said the game is pretty good and I will keep buying it as it slowly creeps it way into the stores.

A Song of Ice and Fire RPG has a similar story. Even with the success of the HBO series to try and spur them on they have only managed to release the Core Book, a campaign guide, a single adventure and some kind of campaign starter guide in two years. And on top of that the quality control is dreadful. It is full of mistakes and the mechanics are extremely fragile. The game has a number of interesting ideas but without a lot of house rulling it is very frustrating to play.

3e would not have been published.

We would have been stuck with the same crappy, uninspiring mechanics that stopped me from ever purchasing one of the earlier editions. FFG managed to put together original rules that fit the setting beautifully. Green Ronin has never IMO been able to put together good enough writers to get me interested in their IMO poor rules implementations.

If GR had written the 3rd edition it would be much closer to the 2nd edition and it would not have that much fiddly card, counter and table crap included.

Additionally maybe because of GW restrictions not much new territory like Arabia or Nippon is opened in any edition - and there is really no reason to buy another source book on middenheim or the chaos gods if you own the good 2nd ed. stuff. So even if GR makes 3rd edition I have still no reason to buy a WFRP book.

Also I think with GR we would see many more b&w illustrations instead of full color.

superklaus said:

Green Ronin wrote 2nd Edition (well most of it). If they still had the licence then 3rd Edition would not exist.

Captain Fluffy said:

Not in its current form perhaps, but there would be a GR/BI 3rd edition. They had already started working on it when GW closed BI.

I find Green Ronin to be much like Crafty Games - nice independent studios with good people involved, but their ability to deliver is suspect compared with competitors. GR's effort with GRRM's material has been disappointing in volume (and not as good as the Guardians of Order effort, IMHO). Crafty still hasn't released their 10 000 Bullets offering, instead choosing to muck around in the ultra-competitive medieval fantasy space.

If Green Ronin was working on this game line, we would have lost an opportunity for Jason Little to bring the most innovative, fresh set of rules mechanics to tabletop roleplaying since the original days of dice pools for test resolution in the early 1990s (White Wolf, Shadowrun). Mr. Litt'e's design is the first I've encountered which fully supports a GM who has a 100% improvisational game style (world, characters, and interaction all created off the cuff). White Wolf was able to lead down that road in the 1990s, but WHFRP3e advances the paradigm and execution all the further.

I would use WHFRP3e as the game engine for any RPG I would run - gritty medieval fantasy or not. The rules design is easy to understand and convert to relevance in other settings. The flexibility around the dynamic creation and deployment of NPCs is ingenious.

BTW - I personally think GW's canon is a waste of time. But I buy everything WHFRP3 related because of the brilliant game system, and use it with other canon and game worlds.

I really like second edition. Just wanted to make that plain. I think the system works really well, and I love the materials Green Ronin released for it; those are great supplements, full of dense, complex descriptions, with usually great artwork. I find amazing the way they talked a lot about the universe in it's multiple aspects, giving us brief but very useful descriptions, and tables with numbers, in Sigmar's Heir, a lot about the history and common worsjip of the Gods in Tome of Salvation and great theories about the "physics" of magic and the world in Realms of Sorcery. They were really thorough in what they bringed, but also you couldn't find definitions set in stone, so the usual mystery of the Warhammer World was kept. And I still love the format they used for the Old World Bestiary, where the first part you find a book that every player could read, with indications of different levels of understading the creatures, and a second part with the characteristics; and the format of second edition adventures, where a city or region was very well detailed, with a lot of seeds for other uses and great maps.

For all of that, I was very doubtful when 3e came. I fell in love for it as well, mainly because of it's amazing approach on mechanics. The idea that the rules aspect meddle sweetly with storytelling is one that has always gained my heart.

I don't think that same thing about other GR products. I liked Modern, I think it was one of the first well done adaptations for D20 3.0. And I'm disappointed with Song of Ice and Fire.

So, I don't know how 3e would be if Green Ronin wa the company to release it. Probably just an upgrade from the second. If the question is "how it would be if the 3e was released by GR with the same approach it has from FFG?", then I think the differences would be... I don't know if we would get as many parts as we have today. I imagine a lot of the materials would be for printing. I don't know if we would get a specific dice set as well. I imagine the aspect of mechanic-storytelling integration would go another way, less board gamely. And I do think we would be seeing less releases, but thicker ones in terms of fluff and description, I don't think POD would ever happen, and so I guess we would have a way of dealing with the line that would be farther of the high consume rating WHFR has today (I'm not critizing that, I love to buy WHFR stuff, I just get a little scared when the completionist in me meets the money administrator).

But, you know, I would like to see the same question Jay H asks taken into wilder realms. Can you imagine how WHFR 3e would be if it was released by R. Talsorian Games? :]

OMG lets really go wild and imagine that the WFRP license went to palladium games and they created a WFRP/Rifts Supers crossover. That would really get all the pretentious strike to stunners panties up in a bunch.